Narendra Modi speaks extempore and strikes a chord

Narendra Modi on Friday, delivering his first Independence Day speech as India's Prime Minister, made a significant departure from tradition.

| TNN | Aug 16, 2014, 05.32 AM IST

Narendra Modi speaks extempore and strikes a chord

02:59

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NEW DELHI: Narendra Modi on Friday, delivering his first Independence Day speech as India's Prime Minister, made a significant departure from tradition. He chose to address the nation without the help of a teleprompter or a written speech and spoke extempore for close to 60 minutes without faltering even once. In over three decades, since Indira Gandhi's death, no Prime Minister has taken the risk of speaking from the ramparts of Lal Qila without a script.

Even one of the finest orators of Indian politics, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, read out written speeches on Independence Day during his tenure as PM. Before him, only country's first PM Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had made extempore speeches on independence Day. Modi on Friday chose to just carry some notes and improvised on them in his quintessential style exhibiting a freedom and establishing a connect that most PMs in the recent past have failed to achieve.

As noted academic Pushpesh Pant, who is reported to have written speeches for Rajiv Gandhi, puts it: "To a generation that has watched a tired Vajpayee taking excruciatingly long pauses and a Manmohan Singh whose hand could not even rise above his shoulders while saying Jai Hind, Modi's speech looks magical. Modi used his hands effectively, projected his voice appropriately (as if speaking from the heart) and carefully wore a turban with saffron and green to go with a white kurta."

Not surprisingly, social media lapped it up calling the speech "refreshing" even as political observers found it a break from the "elitist" nature of past speeches. But why would a first-time PM, who calls himself an outsider and has been in the chair for barely three months, risk slip ups and faux pas through an extempore when not just the nation but even world leaders were listening to him?

Media advisor to former PM Manmohan Singh, Sanjaya Baru says, "Independence Day is the only day when the Prime Minister speaks to the nation. The tradition itself began as an informal exercise in 1947 when Jawaharlal Nehru delivered an emotional speech extempore. In that sense Modi has only taken the ritual back to its origin."

The comparison with Nehru is significant. Atul Mishra, assistant professor at Central University of Gujarat says, "Nation is an emotional construct whose idea needs to be communicated through political speech. Prime Minister Modi seems to have learnt this from Nehru, even though their ideas of India are different. And few after Nehru have had the capacity and confidence to articulate an idea of India until Modi came around."

Ironically, however, Modi on Friday announced the scrapping of the one institution that Nehru built—the Planning Commission. "In a way it's a signal of the end of the Nehruvian era and beginning of a new one," says Baru.

Pant, however, feels Modi is just too good a speaker to read a written speech. "Many may not agree, but he is a better orator than Vajpayee, who was too old and too tired when he became PM. Vajpayee's speeches had more poetry than substance. Modi talks work. He has the confidence of a massive mandate that he has won on his own strength. He has absolute clarity of thought and knows what he is saying and what he can achieve. It's this confidence that made him remove the bulletproof sheet between him and the people," says Pant.

That Modi is a clever orator is not lost on anyone. Social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan said, "Modi has a rhetoric of orality. He evokes ancestors. He has these short effective slogans. And he manages to pull it off. It's not an extempore. He has rehearsed it but he improvises around a basic text. So he doesn't go wrong and remains effective and scores. He is a man easy with speech and loves the masses."

Pant goes deeper into Modi's dexterity with speech and demeanors on Friday. He says, "Look how subtly he has appropriated Indira's 'Garibi Hatao' and Lal Bahadur Shastri's 'Jai Jawan Jai Kisan'. At the same time he has also attempted to wash communal sins by making conciliatory approaches."

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